The Chocolate Flip doesn’t contain the slightest hint of anything remotely chocolate. No, in the manner of its very close relative, the Coffee Cocktail, the Chocolate Flip blends brandy and a whole egg with more sugary/fruity ingredients to create a more sweet than bitter flavor and a light tan color. If you’re determined to think it tastes slightly like chocolate, then I guess it does.. It’s really just another of the countless variations on the Flip formula, but an interesting enough combo that I think it deserves it’s own post.

The Chocolate Flip comes directly from David Embury’s “The Fine Art of Mixing Cocktails,” though it’s  only referred to in passing. Mr. Embury’s preference was towards somewhat dry drinks, which he believed were ideal for stimulating the appetite before a meal, and this is actually a nearly ideal dessert or, if you dare, breakfast beverage.

Chocolate-free though it is, the Chocolate Flip, even in this version, is fattening enough that making this drink over the course of a week has probably accounted for at least an additional pound or two on yours truly thanks to adding seven eggs to my weekly diet. To be fair, however, my appetite has never required much stimulating.

The Chocolate Flip

1 ounce brandy
1 ounce sloe gin
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoon superfine sugar or simple syrup
Sprinkling of nutmeg (borderline mandatory garnish)

I have done so many of these egg-based drinks, I could probably just cut and paste this part, but I like you guys, so I’ll write this for you fresh. Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker without ice for the so-called dry shake. Shake the contents fairly vigorously, but be careful to watch out for the interesting phenomenon that happens when you shake whole eggs or egg white; the top of your shaker may want to pop off and make a mess. Next, add ice and shake more vigorously for about 15 seconds or so. Strain into a chilled glass. (Cocktail glasses and old fashioned glasses are both good.)

*****

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: egg whites and whole eggs are by far my favorite non-alcoholic cocktail ingredients; they have a way of harmonizing diverse flavors and covering up a host of cocktailing sins. The Chocolate Flip is sweet, refreshing and milky, like other flips, but with more potential for complexity if you use decent ingredients. It’s not really chocolatey to my taste, but it is delightfully chewy in flavor when you’re using the good stuff.

In particular, I must warn you to use a decent brand of sloe gin — there’s only one widely available here in Southern California, so my choice was the outstanding, and relatively new, Plymouth Sloe Gin. The results were consistently delicious whether I used minimal or more generous proportions of sweetener. On the other hand, using not-at-all-decent Luscious Sloe Gin (on its own by far the most cough syrup-like product I’ve tasted from Dekuyper), produced a drink that was, thanks to the egg, still drinkable, but nevertheless somewhat alarming. There were some forgotten flavors from childhood in the Pepto-bismal looking concoction (Good & Plenty???), but it was definitely marked by a sharp decline in quality and appearance.

The differences in brandy were less pronounced. E&J VSOP, far from my favorite, nevertheless produced really tasty results on every try. However, my value-priced/very good default brandy, Reynal, was truly outstanding in the Chocolate Flip, boosting the complexity and adding some additional body. Lord knows what would happen if you used a really expensive Cognac or Armagnac in it, but I’d like to taste the results.

Next, a word about those darn egg products. I used both pasteurized whole eggs and a prepackaged supermarket scrambled egg brand. The results were, I think, indistinguishable. So, if you’re skittish about using raw eggs (my friend at the local health department thinks you should be), but don’t want to shell out for pasteurized eggs, buying some milk-carton whole egg products makes a lot of sense. They’re also less explosive and easier to emulsify.

Finally, I should add that the other recipes I found online for the Chocolate Flip call for some amount of cream. I think the Coffee Flip is plenty rich without it and am in no mood to gain even more weight, but I’m sure it’s a tasty, more exotic variant of egg nog. If you’re feeling like an early Christmas, I won’t try to stop you from trying it.